Turning the page: Japan's last pager service ends after 50 years

Some of you might be young enough to not know that there once existed communication devices known as pagers. The age of mobile phones, let alone smartphones, marked the end of pagers across the globe. Japan has been a bit slow to give them up compared to the rest of the world. The last remaining pager service in Japan is now shutting down. Tokyo Telemessage Inc. is the last remaining service provider for pagers in Japan. It has some 1,500 users that are still relying on these devices. Some of those users work in hospitals where pagers have long been used as they don’t emit electromagnetic waves.The other subset of users will likely be older individuals who just didn’t want to give up their pagers. More than 20 percent of the country’s entire population is over the age of 65 after all. The company is providing them with a grace period, though. It won’t shut down the service abruptly. Users have until September 2019 to get their pager affairs sorted because they will not be able to use